The Blockbuster Etheruem Meetup with Keynote Speaker Vitalik Buterin on the 16th of August 2017 had the largest turnout to date with an approximately 250 attendees packing the first and second level of SGInnovate, a co-working space and venue partner of the event organized by Ethereum Foundation, Singapore, and DigixGlobal. The number of interested participants however were more than the venue could accommodate. There were another 350 names on the waitlist and more than 10,000 views on the YouTube Live Stream channel.
Buterin walked in around 6.40pm wearing a Hard Fork Cafe T-Shirt and in dark blue bermuda, totally going against the decorum that older, traditional folks would come to expect of keynote speakers. But this is the Founder of Ethereum and in the sphere of cryptocurrency, this eccentric genius is revered to divine levels by some, and by the way his fans rushed up on stage for a photo opportunity, you would be forgiven for thinking that this was a Kpop concert.
The topics covered for this event were on the upcoming slated release of Metropolis, and the update on where Ethereum was headed with Proof of Stake.
Buterin opened the session giving newbies a detailed overview about cryptocurrency, blockchain, and smart contracts, before diving into the technicalities of sharding and the impact it has on security. Midway through the speech, someone hung a makeshift banner at the back of the room with the handwritten text ‘Buy $NEO’, which in turn prompted Buterin to respond candidly with: ‘Don’t buy NEO, sell your NEO’.
Scalability has been one of the hottest issue this year and Bitcoin recently took centerstage with its forking drama in July this year. Bitcoin can handle three transactions per second; Ethereum at five. This is in stark contrast with PayPal and Visa capability in handling 190 and 1,600 transaction per second respectively. The current figures cannot hold if the volume of crypto users increase to reach mainstream adoption. The technical challenge would be to improve scalability without compromising security while still maintaining the integrity of a decentralised network.
The proposed solution is ‘Sharding’.
Sharding splits the space of each contract into smaller subspace — ‘shards’ — based on the first digit of their addresses.
The workload of validation is divided to handle batches of allocated shards, and since each node on the network does not have to validate all transactions, the network can effectively handle more volume without impacting transaction time. Details of Sharding can be found in this link (https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ).
You can see the video recording of the event in this video link ().
Notable members of the crypto universe spotted at the event were Dr. Julian Hosp and Toby Hoenisch from TenX, Yusho from Coinhako, and Valentin Preobrazhenaky from LAToken.
You can download the Howdy App or Meetup App and search for Ethereum Singapore to get news on the next Ethereum event.
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Originally published at http://www.eugenetay.com.